Gates closed his eyes. When they popped back open the turmoil that had raged across Gates’s face was gone.
“I love you, Will,” Gates said.
Will remained perfectly still. Gates walked to him and placed his bloody hand on Will’s shoulder. Gates backed him into the wall. The bloody box cutter was still gripped in his hand.
“You love me, right?” Gates said.
Gates’s desperate eyes flicked over Will’s face. His face was way too close to Will’s. A thumb’s width away. Every direction that Will tried to move his head to look away, Gates would move his face there.
“Come on,” Gates said. “Say it back.”
“Uh …” Will’s throat had gone dry with fear.
“I need you to say it. It’s not so hard,” Gates said. “Friends say it all the time.”
“They don’t,” Will said, but he didn’t know why he was bothering to talk sense into Gates. The guy was sick. There was something wrong with him. Will might have had a glitch in his brain, but this dude’s brain had a fatal error.
“You’re stalling, Will. Just say it. Don’t make it weird,” Gates said.
Gates’s pupils were bottomless. He blinked and scratched at his red eye.
“You’d do it for David,” he said. “Do it for me.”
“David’s my brother.”
“David’s dead! And I’ve given you everything!”
The air around them was still and silent. Will started to sweat all over. He could feel Gates’s breath on his face. His stomach flip-flopped.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?” Gates said.
“No, hell no,” Will said. As long as he had that box cutter, Will had to say whatever would calm Gates down.
“’Cause it seems like you’re mad at me,” Gates said.
“No,” Will said.
“You swear,” he said.
“Yeah, Gates, I swear.”
“But you do love me though, right?”
“Eh …,” Will said. He’d never felt so uncomfortable in his life.
“Just say it!” Gates screamed.
Gates clocked him. A real punch, knuckles to eye socket. Will’s legs went jelly. His ass hit the floor and his head smacked the wall. Gates was on his knees, hugging Will, almost immediately.
“No-no-no, I’m sorry,” Gates said. “That was a mistake. We all make mistakes, right? I didn’t mean it.”
Tears streamed down Gates’s face. Will was dizzy and discombobulated from the punch. Gates hugged him even harder. His wet cheek pressed into Will’s, and their skin slid across each other’s. Beyond Gates, Will could see Pruitt on the floor. He’d stopped moving, his face was turned away, and there was an oblong pool of blood extending out from his head.
“You have to forgive me,” Gates moaned. “That wasn’t me just then. Please. Will, please, I need you to forgive me. Please forgive me.”
He was a sobbing, psychotic, mess.
“I forgive you,” Will managed to say.
“You do?” Gates said and he pulled back from Will. Desperate hope lit up his face.
Will nodded, his eye swelling with pain by the second.
“And you love me?”
Will sagged. He didn’t want to die. Not here. Not at the hands of this maniac. Will took a deep breath and ignored the alarm bells ringing in his head, the itch in his blood, the intuitive sense that this was a titanic mistake.
“I love you,” Will said.
Gates’s tears doubled, but they were happy. They dripped around his smiling lips and off his unbrushed teeth.
Gates continued to cry, and to hug Will, for a long time. Will had to keep on telling him that he wasn’t mad at him, that he loved him and he forgave him. After what seemed like the hundredth exchange, Gates seemed convinced that Will did love him, and wasn’t mad at him. Gates had finally worn himself out. Scalping a friend and having a breakdown were apparently exhausting.
“I’m tired,” Gates said.
“You know what we should do, buddy?” Will said.
“What?”
“We should go home and get some shut-eye. We’ve been partying so hard.”
“Yeah. That sounds good.” Gates nodded. “We should make bunk beds.”
Will forced a trembling smile. Gates stood up, and then Will did. Will glanced down at the box cutter. He wasn’t out of the woods until he stepped out of that classroom door and into the hallway beyond.
“Let’s go home,” Gates said, and started off toward the hall.
Will followed steadily, with no sudden moves. He could feel the box cutter blade carving across his forehead, and the ripping pain of Gates tugging his scalp off his skull.
As Will stepped into the hall after Gates, he was holding his breath. There was a mixture of gangs in the hall, maybe a hundred strong, trading information about Sam.
Will dashed into the crowd.
“Will …,” he heard Gates say behind him. “Where are you …”
“Gates found Sam!” Will said. “He needs help!”
The crowd started running past him. They swarmed Gates, and Will kept moving, pushing past body after body.
“No!” Gates howled after him, but Will didn’t look back. “Don’t leave! DON’T LEAVE ME!”
The tortured cry cut through the confused talk of the crowd and reverberated through the halls. It was a sound that rang in Will’s ears long after he’d lost Gates. It chilled him to the bone.
34
“I NEED A BREATHER,” SOPHIA SAID. “GONNA grab some water. You need anything?”
“Nah,” Lucy said. “I’m good.”
She sat down on one of the stools by the cafeteria doors, and wiped the sweat off her brow with her sleeve. She and Sophia had been sparring for a half hour, and Lucy had held her own. Sophia had said it was good for making their guard duty hours go a little faster, but Lucy was afraid the suggestion was about something else. Pity.
Not only was Lucy the girl who cried wolf when it came to sex, she was the one Slut the rest of the gang had to worry about in a fight, the weakest link in the chain, thanks to her recent run-in with the Pretty Ones.
Lucy pushed up her sweaty sleeves. She looked at her arms. They were marred by wide, crisscrossing, scabbed-over grooves made by the Pretty Ones’ claws. She looked like she’d had a tussle with a weed wacker. Her face hadn’t fared much better. Hopefully, she wouldn’t look like Ritchie once they healed. And then there was the ultimate humiliation, they’d chopped off her hair. It was too short in the back, and it did not look cute.
Soft footsteps approached. Lucy looked up to see Maxine walking across the dining hall, toward her. One hand held that perfectly potted flower, the other held her little pregnant belly.
“Taking Minnie for a walk?” Lucy said.
“Looking for you,” Maxine said.
“Me?”
Maxine nodded. As long as Lucy had known the girl, Maxine had never looked for anyone. She avoided them. Maxine settled to a stop in front of Lucy. She swayed ever so slightly side to side. A sweet smile spread across her face. Another first.
“My baby’s going to live,” Maxine said. She laughed and cried as she spoke. She was bubbling over with feeling. “She’s going to live, Lucy!”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m graduating,” Maxine said.
That special cocktail of emotion came over Lucy, the one she felt every time she heard someone say those words. She was happy, she was jealous, and she was sad at the thought of losing this person from her life. But the sadness was minimal this time. Everyone’s prayers for Maxine had been answered. In an instant she’d gone from the girl you couldn’t look in the eye because of the doom she carried in her belly, to an expecting mother, about to start a new life.
Lucy took Maxine’s free hand and squeezed it. She would have hugged the girl, but she was afraid she might crush the flower.
“Congratulations!” Lucy said. She couldn’t stop smiling. “You deserve it.”
“I want you to have Minnie.”
Lucy stared at Maxine, who held the flower out.
“Really?”
“I know you’ll take the best care of her. You know how important she is,” Maxine said with a nod. She pushed the flower into Lucy’s hands.
“I don’t know what to say,” Lucy said.
“You have to say yes. You have to keep her alive.”
“I will,” Lucy said.
“I wrote down everything you need to know,” Maxine said, and pulled a folded piece of paper out of her pocket. “These are the directions to her room.”
“Her room?” Lucy said, taking the paper.
“It’s on the third floor. She needs to be there at sunrise, every day. Promise.”
“I … promise,” Lucy said, unsure about what exactly she was promising.
Maxine smiled and then walked to the cafeteria doors. Lucy looked to the flower in her hands. She ran the back of her fingers across the petals. She allowed herself a single, gentle squeeze of one petal, and it was lovely. She could feel the water inside it. She could feel how it would break apart if she were just to press a little harder. For a moment, Lucy lost herself, completely whisked away into a memory of a different time, of a different place, when she was little, when a pleasure like this was as big as life got.
Maxine left the cafeteria. As the doors drifted shut, a blood-spattered hand shot in between them. A boy’s hand. Lucy jumped. Somebody was trying to get in, and she wasn’t doing her job. She placed the flower on the stool and reached down to the paperback strapped to her thigh. She pulled her knife, sheathed between the pages, and charged the door.
Will pushed through the doors from the hall.
“Lucy!”
Lucy lowered her knife. “Will, what are you—”
The flesh around his eye was stained by a fresh red and blue bruise.
“Oh my god,” Lucy said. “Are you okay?”
